 So, Coree, the Floss is yours. I'm happy to have you here for our pre-Fossum community event. Well, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to chat with you folks, and nice to see some familiar names there in the attendee list. Hi, Carmen. So, I wanted to give you a talk about the relationship between free software and some of the wider questions that we're facing in our world today. And to get there, I wanted to start by asking why it is we care about Floss. What's the freedom when we say software freedom? And I think that it's not the four freedoms. It's what the four freedoms get you, which is self-determination, the right to configure the technology around you so that it does what you needed to do, and the right to band with others so that you can alter configurations so that technology works on your behalf instead of against your interests. And the thing that has been the biggest threat to software freedom in the decades since it was founded is not business per se or proprietary instinct or what have you. I think it's big tech. And I think big tech has become a kind of cancer on software freedom and on self-determination. You know, as Tom Eastman, the software developer in New Zealand says, I'm old enough to remember when the web wasn't just five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of text from the other four. So remember when the big tech leaders all crawled to the top of Trump Tower in 2016 to congratulate Donald Trump on winning the election, and we saw them all gathered around that one boardroom table and we were aghast that the leaders of our technological universe were willing to meet with Donald Trump. As frightening as it is that they were willing to make that moral compromise, what I think is far more frightening is that the leaders of all the tech can fit around a single table. Big tech lies all the time with WhatsApp and Instagram. They promised the European regulators that they wouldn't use that merger as an excuse to merge the back ends and do undermining across all three services. Then they did it anyway. When Google made its acquisitions of Yahoo Gmail and launched Gmail and bought its ad tech companies and so on, they are... Sorry, I screwed that up. Google, when it made its acquisition of YouTube, not Yahoo, sorry. It's early in the morning here in California. When they made those acquisitions, they promised they wouldn't mine data across the back ends of all of those and they lied and they did it anyway. Amazon, when it bought Audible, promised that it would drop Audible's DRM so that the leading audio book vendor in the field would no longer lock its products to their offerings forever and they lied. It's been now 15 years, 13 years, still haven't done it. And Apple, they told us that the only reason they wanted to lock us into only using approved apps on our phones was to make sure that they would be secure and reliable and then it spent millions of dollars blocking 20 right to repair initiatives across 20 US states in 2018. And then as a chaser, it allowed the Chinese state to order it to remove all working privacy tools from its device, all of which is preserved by its lock-in, by its DRM use. And the thing is that all of these companies that lied and lied in material ways that created great public arms, they all got away with it. They might have paid fines, but as they say, a fine is just a price. The ultimate price, right? The price that would have been meaningful for these firms as a consequence of having told these material lies that created harms would have been to undo the harms, to force them to divest of companies that they acquired on under false terms, to take away gold privileges that allow them to decide who can install apps or otherwise modify their devices and so on. And the reason they got away with these lies is because they're monopolists. And monopolists have two enormous advantages when it comes to getting away with lies. The first is that they have a lot of money. The reason companies form monopolies is because it allows them to extract what are called monopoly rents, the supernormal profits that arise from being able to deprive users of choice that might cause them to choose to do things that disadvantage your shareholders. And so monopolists have a lot of money and they also have a built-in solution to the collective action problem of how to solve that money because if everyone can fit around a single boardroom table at the top of Trump Tower, then you can hold a meeting and decide what to do with your money. If there are more people than could fit in a football stadium, then you would never be able to make a decision about how to act collectively. I mean, those of you who've been to FOSDEM in person probably know that once you get beyond five or six people, you can't even agree on where you're going to go for dinner after the conference, let alone how you're all going to collaborate to make something happen. So all of these millions, they allow companies like Facebook to hire the former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, give him millions to prance around the European Union, perverting the course of justice. It allows them to create laws that block competition and that allows them to dodge taxes and starve governments of the resources that they would need to enforce against them. Those are all outcomes, not of being big tech, but of being monopolistic tech. Now, when FOSDEM started, the earliest days of the free software movement, it was concentrated on source code access. A demand for source is a demand for labor saving. It says, I could reverse engineer your product so that I could make an interoperable or compatible one, but doing so is tedious. And there are only so many hours left in my life. And so rather than making me go through the lengthy, tedious business of figuring out how you wrote your code, just give me the code so I can fix it. But while we were arguing about whether companies should voluntarily cough up their sources, monopolist made reverse engineering a crime. Between terms of service, digital rights management, software copyrights and patents, and even bizarre innovations like copywriting APIs, something working its way through the U.S. courts at the moment. The traditional categories of free software and unfree software have ceased to be meaningful because they've both been eclipsed by a new kind of software. Software where reverse engineering it, we're understanding it, we're making security analysis of it, we're making interoperable products for it while extending it beyond its end of life. That software is a felony to interoperate with because you violate anti-circumvention rules like Article 6 of the European Copyright Directive or the Digital Money and Copyright Act of 1998 in the United States or because you violate terms of service and create offenses under cybersecurity laws or other exotic theories. Software you can't interoperate with without risking bankruptcy and a long prison sentence, rather, is fundamentally different and far worse than merely unfree software and it shifts the equilibrium because, after all, the pitch for free software will just, if you give me your source code, I will figure out how to make your product better. It was also, if you don't give me your source code, I'm going to reverse engineer it and figure out how to make your product better. And now we take the stick off the table and all we've got is the carrot. Please, company, let me see your sources so I can make your product better and there's no or else. Do what monopolists do. They turn money into power and that power lets them buy policies that benefit themselves at the great expense of everyone else. And the thing is, the tech industry is not unique in perverting power using monopoly. Every industry in the economy is now concentrated and where there's concentration, there's corruption. You know, we're down to four movie studios, three record labels, two beer companies and one eyewear company, the French-Italian giant Luxottica Essalore. Luxottica Essalore took in an enormous amount of private equity money. They bought every high street eyewear brand you've ever heard of, Oliver Peeples and Versace and Coach and Oakley and Bausch and Lohm, all of them. Then they bought every major eyewear retailer in the world. They own Lens Crafters and Sceptical, Target Optical, every eyewear shop that you will see in a mall or walking down a high street in any city in the West. And then what they did was for all the brands that wouldn't sell to them, they refused to carry them in the major retailers until they were approaching bankruptcy and then they bought them for pennies on the Euro. After they'd acquired dominance of the entire eyewear market, they bought Essalore, a monopolist in lens manufacture. And Essalore now makes more than 50% of the world's lenses perched that it had climbed to by the anti-competitive monopolistic tactic of buying all of its competitors, not by making the best products, but by buying up everyone who might compete with them so that people had no choice. And then they bought the largest eyewear insurer in the world, IMED. So now, after a decade of consolidation, eyeglasses cost 1,000% more than they did before Essalore began its buying spree. And so it's every industry where you can see this perversion of public policy in service to private parochial gain. And many of these companies, they're European companies or at least notionally, they fly flags of convenience over the European Union's most corporate friendly states from countries like Malta, where journalists reporting on cheating multi-nationals get blown up by car bombs and no one can ever find the assassin who killed them. To Luxembourg, a criminal enterprise that happens to also be a country. The city of London, no longer part of the European Union, but for the longest time an epicenter of finance crime, the laundry for the world's global criminal empires, more than we could ever enumerate today. And these companies lie and they get away with it too. You have the pharma companies who told us that opioids were safe and you have Boeing who told us that the 737 MAX wouldn't fall out of the sky, that they could be trusted to self-certify their own avionics and that it wouldn't result in mass murder of hundreds of people as their airplanes fill out of the sky. And these companies didn't get punished. Boeing murdered hundreds of people, spent itself dry in socially useless stock buybacks and then when the crisis hit, they got billions of dollars in bailouts to make sure that they could go on doing so. And the Sacklers, the founders of Purdue Pharma, the epicenter of the opioid epidemic with their blockbuster opioid OxyContin, they smuggled their blood-soaked millions, billions out of the European Union, out of the US into the European Union's tax havens and they are now richer than the Rockefellers. And there are still plenty of galleries all around the world that have their names on them, celebrating them for their so-called philanthropy. And we look on this corruption. We look on these conspiracies among the wealthy and the governments that are supposed to hold them to account and we call, we say that the reason that people believe in conspiracies is because of big tech and it's ridiculous. What's more likely, that Facebook moved into the mind control ray to sell your kid's fidget spinners and then the mercers stole it and made your uncle into a racist or that people believe in outlandish conspiracies like eugenics or vaccine denial or QAnon or the Flat Earth because they have been traumatized over and over again by real undeniable conspiracies that we just call corruption. After all, the best evidence we've seen for big tech being able to manipulate our opinion comes from big tech's own boasts, the sales literature that they circulate to potential customers saying if only you give us your money, we will bring you your customers. When they promise they can sell anyone anything, they're not describing peer reviewed studies, they're engaged in marketing puffery. We've already established that big tech lies about everything all the time. Do you really think that the only time they're not lying is when they're boasting to potential customers about how great their products are? Advertisers after all have always been best at selling advertising. The department store Magnate John Wanamaker is infamous for having said, I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted. I just don't know which half. And while this is often thought of as an indictment of advertising, I think the best thing that we can say about it, the most important observation we can make about it is that the advertising agencies John Wanamaker dealt with were really good because they convinced him that only half of his advertising money was being wasted. Ad tech is no different. A careful 2019 study by three American business researchers found that behavioral ads, the ads that are based on constant invasive surveillance don't perform significantly better than contextual ads. The ads that are placed based on looking what article you're reading, not who you are and what you read yesterday. And when the Dutch public broadcaster, NPO, switched from behavioral ads to contextual ads, they saw year-on-year revenue growth of 62% in the first month and 79% in the second month. And they didn't have to give half the money to useless spying, lying ad tech companies. Ad tech is a lie because monopolies are liars. Monopolists don't need to make good products to succeed. That's the point. We're all in this together. Before the ecology movement was founded in the 1970s, there were just issues. Some people cared about owls and other people cared about the ozone layer. And it wasn't immediately apparent that those were the same issue. After all, caring about the atmosphere and caring about furry critters, they're not obviously the same thing. They're not obviously the same fight. But the term ecology welded 1,000 different issues into a single movement, a movement called ecology in which people who cared about owls and ozone, freshwater, saltwater, people who cared about the plight of bees and the way that our monocultural agriculture were everything, they all were part of the same concert movement. Today, there are people who are angry about monopolies because they love beer or because they wear glasses or because they work in the auto industry or because a bank stole their house or because a private act fund destroyed their paper or because big tech is making them miserable or just because they're professional wrestling fans. After all 30 years ago, there were 20 professional wrestling leagues. And now the WWE, which managed to eclipse all of its competitors, not by out-competing them, but by buying them all and shuttering them. So now everyone who wants to wrestle has to wrestle for one guy, a guy named Vince McMahon. He's worth $3.5 billion. He's a major Trump donor and he misclassifies his workers just like Uber does, just like Postmates does, just like Amazon does with their warehouse workers, calling them contractors instead of employees, which means that he doesn't have to pay for their medical insurance and he doesn't have to compensate them for workplace injuries. And that particular you ever loved is currently on GoFundMe begging for pennies so that they can die with dignity of the injuries that they sustained while wrestling. There are people who are angry about monopolies for every single reason and they don't know it. They think they're angry about wrestling or finance or oil, but they're really angry about monopolies. And that's the thing that people who care for your software should really care for your software because monopolies steal our self-determination. They corrupt our political process. They distort our ability to agree on what is true and most importantly, they're rendering our planet unfit for human habitation and risking the extinction of our species. And I mean it should go without saying, but this is the only known planet in the entire infinite observable universe that is capable of sustaining human life. We don't have a plan B. Billionaires think that they can build luxury bunkers and wait out the end of the world, reemerging with thumb drives full of Bitcoin, gemstone quality rubies, and AR-15s to become tribal warlords. But they're wrong. There is no future that is not a shared future. We are all in this together and once we figure that out, we will be unstoppable. Thank you. And now I'm ready to take your questions. Yeah, thanks a lot, Kori, for this awesome talk, which I think brings us in the mood for Foster 2021. And as you said, we are open for questions. People are uploading digitally. And again, for people who joined us a bit later, this meeting is recorded. So if you want to raise your question and won't be recorded, please do it in the chat. I'll just open your mic or your camera and go ahead. I understand that all of that was very uncontroversial. So I would understand that. Yeah. Yeah. So there's nothing to ask. Lukas has a question. And afterwards, Vittorio. So Lukas, could you start? Yes. That's just me. Okay. Hey, Kori. Thank you very much for this inspiring talk. Since I'm a legal guy, I would like to know a little bit more and your talk is all about the relation with free software and the monopoly. What do you think about the initiatives of the European Commission on the DSA and DMA and the relation with free software? Could you please elaborate a little bit on that? Yeah, I think DSA and DMA, for those of you who have not been paying attention, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act of the European Union, they are both extremely admirable and they go a long way on interoperability, which I think will be good for establishing the kind of self-determination. I mean, let's not fetishize competition for its own sake, but competition that leads to self-determination where users get to choose the technology that serves them best. That's the thing we should attend to. I think that what they've been good at doing or what they've sketched out that's admirable is a floor underneath interoperability because what they've got is a bunch of interoperability mandates. So you must open up this API. You must provide access to this kind of data under these kinds of structures. You must not engage in certain kinds of self-preferencing or deceptive conduct. Maybe you have to divest of certain divisions that enable self-preferencing, but those are secondary considerations. They're the punishment that you get for not living up to the obligations in the first place. And I think that that's the first problem I have with the DSA and DMA is that if you ask companies not to self-preference, not to put their own products at the top of the search results unless they're really the best, you're going to run up against an enormous enforcement problem because it's very hard to know what the best is. When Google says, well, we put our weather results, when you type in, you know, weather Berlin, we just put our own weather box at the top of the page. Not because we're self-preferencing, but because we do a better job at telling you what the weather is than someone else. There's no like empirical standard. You can evaluate the betterness or worseness of the weather because they're all working from the same meteorological data. So they're all going to say, oh, the temperature is three degrees centigrade and we've got an 18% chance of rain today. So beyond that, there's no obvious better. And so instead, the best way to prevent self-preferencing by large firms is to remove the impetus to self-preference, to just make them divest of anything that would cause them to receive a commercial advantage from doing something shady, from self-preferencing. And that has been the historic remedy for this kind of conglomerate behavior. It's something called structural separation. So historically, for example, rail companies were forbidden from operating freight shipping companies because they also ship freight for other people. And it's very hard to say, oh, well, the reason we gave our division a better price for freight is not because we're trying to pad our bottom line, but because that company is just easier to work with. It's less paperwork. Well, of course it's less paperwork. You own them, but you can always make that argument. And so I would say that as a first step that we should be looking towards structural separation rather than trying to ask a court or a regulator down the road to make these what I think will be nearly impossible determinations about self-preferencing in search and in other mechanisms. And then the second, and I think the most relevant one for free software is about adversarial interoperability or what we call competitive compatibility. Some of you probably know Christoph Schmohn who's our European director, so a lovely Austrian fellow. And he pointed out that it's very hard for German speakers to pronounce adversarial interoperability. It's like trying to get an English speaker to say fingerspits in good food. So we rebranded it. It's called competitive compatibility. But the idea behind competitive compatibility or ComCom is that firms should not be given the legal tools to prevent interoperability per se. Right? So right now we have seen firms repurpose copyright law and para-copyrights like anti-circumvention. We've seen them repurpose terms of service and cybersecurity law and trade secrecy, non-compete clauses, and so on. As a mechanism to prevent third parties from creating interoperable products and services, and they're doing so even though those interoperable products and services are socially beneficial. They allow bona fide users to do things that are otherwise lawful, right? For example, to block ads or to add more privacy to the way that they use it, to block the way that their data is being harvested and so on. And when that happens, what you're effectively doing is allowing firms to take existing statutes and design their products so that using their products in ways that are harmful to their shareholders is literally a criminal act or at least a civil offense. And felony contempt of business model is not a statute we should have on the books. And so the idea of competitive compatibility is that we can enshrine in law or policy some form of interoperator's defense that says notwithstanding existing laws and regulation, creating interoperable products and services for the purpose of improving security, allowing bona fide users to do otherwise lawful things to create interoperability with otherwise lawful products and so on, that these are themselves lawful. And you might have to go to court still. You might have to go to court and show a judge that what you did was being done on behalf of a legitimate user was being done in a way that didn't violate another statute and so on. But at least it moves our legal and policy discussion from the realm of did you violate a patent or did you violate a copyright or did you violate terms of service to did you do something socially harmful or socially beneficial? And that's, I think, a much better legal argument for the free software world to have. And the reason that that matters is because a lot of what free software does is this kind of adversarial interoperability. I mean, we're accustomed today to large firms having a GitHub account with their sources posted under some kind of permissive license. But where it all matters, like when it came to open document formats or SAMBA or many other of these key interoperability building blocks, including POSIX compliance, including the GNU Linux. These were all done against the wishes of the firms whose products were being interoperated with. And unless you have that ceiling of, so long as I can figure out how to do it, I'm allowed to do it, then you invite a lot of mischief. You invite the possibility that firms that are mandated to say open an API will simply reduce what kind of data you can access through that API. But if you have the floor, which is the mandate to open an API and the ceiling, which is the right of software developers to go beyond what that API permits, provided they configure it how to do so, then what you have is a new equilibrium where companies that are tempted to engage in sabotage of a mandate know that if they sabotage the mandate, if you nerf your API, then all that's going to happen is you're going to have to contend with a million scrapers. And I think most firms would rather have a managed API with some rules than just play whack-a-mole with a million scrapers who are accomplishing the same thing that that API would have. Okay. Thanks a lot. We have another question by Vittorio. Vittorio, do you want to raise your questions? Yes. Actually, first of all, thanks for saying these things loud and clear. And my original question was to be actually also about the DSA and DMA. So you already said this. So I'd say I just like to point out that the current text of the DMA only has very weak interoperability requirements. So they actually are just for business users, just for payments, and a bit of auxiliary steps. So there's still a battle to be fought to get proper interoperability requirements in that. So I will let us switch my question to something slightly different. So I try to give talks similar to yours in several free software open source conferences. And I often get met with... I mean, people don't seem to be too comfortable in speaking openly about the fact that... I mean, the problems related to the big tech companies. And then you also discover that maybe the conference is actually sponsored by one of these big tech companies or by a foundation which is heavily funded by the big tech companies. Or people then say, well, but these companies are releasing their software for free as an open source or free software. So in the end, they are good people. So there's a big part of our community that actually thinks these people are really good and much better than, say, telcos, ISPs, other types of companies. So how can we address this in our own community and convince everyone that this is a problem? So I think that there's two important aspects to your question. And I will say that there's something beyond business users in DMA, DSA, which is openness for app stores, a requirement to allow side loading, which I think is a huge win and it's not just for business users. That's for hobbyist, tinkerers, free software, co-ops. And that is like, it's really important, right? I mean, you see this playing out with, you know, Fortnite, if Epic, with its billions, can't negotiate better prices on app stores than, you know, what hope do we have? So I think that is a really important victory and let's not discount that. That's really important. As to the question of large firms in open source, the first thing I'll refer you to is Benjamin Mako Hill's keynote at LibrePlanet in 2018 about free software for, software freedom for large companies in open source for the rest of us. And, you know, well, everyone on this call should know that the origin of the fight over free software in open source and that nomenclature was a fight over ethics versus instrumentality, right? That open source was about stressing the business benefits and software quality benefits of source code transparency. And free software was about stressing individual autonomy and collective autonomy and the ability to control how your technology works. And the open source movement claimed that these were functionally equivalent, that it was a distinction without a difference. And the free software side said, no, no, no, there actually is a difference. It may not be apparent now because all free software is also open source. But if you allow free open source and if you focus on source and these utility benefits instead of the ethical compromise or the ethical dimension, eventually you'll see the difference. And now we live in that difference. And this is what Mako talked about. He said, if you are a user of Google, which we all are, you can see the source for its main products, right? You can see all of its backend. It's all sitting there on GitHub. They're using the same products we are, right? They're using the same projects we are. However, only Google gets to change how its backend is configured, right? So you have the ability to audit the source, to review the source, to alter the source, but you can't change it in ways that matter, right? For these distributed applications, which are really all the big meaningful ones these days, for these distributed applications, key components of them are non-free and cannot be made free just from licensing, right? And that was the fight over cloud licenses and whether, you know, software as a service constituted a distribution for the purpose of the license. And, you know, it turned out to be a really important difference. In terms of the firm's role in sponsoring these events, I think we need to understand that the reason the firm sponsored these events is twofold, right? So one is a very cynical thing, right? Which is just this like protective coloration, brandwashing. You know, look at us, we're good citizens. We sponsor free software events. Have some Yerba Mate. We're all in this together, you know, ha ha, right? But another part of it is that like the story of most technologists is the story that I certainly lived through, which is the first time you write code, you experience this incredible rush of self-determination because you've managed to express your will with sufficient precision and crispness that the computer does a thing perfectly that is the reflection of your will. And it does it infinitely at effectively zero cost. I mean, unless you wrote a very complicated program the first time out, effectively zero cost and effectively instantaneously over and over again. And then when you plug in your first modem, you can take that code and you can distribute it to everyone else who could benefit from what you've just done, this self-executing recipe, right? Not a recipe for your favorite cake, but a way to actually just replicate the cake everywhere in the world all at once. And so now you're projecting your will around the world and that's a form of very powerful self-determination. And then as your software travels around the world, you find the communities in which it's found a home. And those communities are communities that you can join and that you can work with together to do things that are more ambitious than any one person can do, not just writing software, but, you know, redefining what gender means or arguing for new political propositions. And that story of self-determination and collective action is so key to the life cycle of a technologist. And these firms for all that they are as an entity kind of cellular automata, right? They're giant colony organisms that, you know, that are immortal and transhuman and use us as gut flora. They're composed of technologists who understand in this very visceral, lived way why technological self-determination matters and yet who are directed as a kind of epiphenomenon of this cellular automata simulation to spend every hour that they're awake figuring out ways to take away people's self-determination. And this is a really important fracture line within technology, right? Because the guards, right, the capos of the prison camps that we have turned technology into are in their hearts on the side of the prisoners. And when that happens, we have the power to make real significant change to find these cross-cutting alliances between users and technologists. That's always been the most important virtue of the free software movement for all that the software can be very user-unfriendly and that's a cliche about free software. The reason to make it is to create this bridge between users and technologists to give users that self-determination. And so when you find yourself in that situation, the impulse that you can appeal to is that impulse that part in everyone's origin story where we were all bitten by a radioactive compiler and that turned us all into technology Spider-Man and to just want everyone else to have that freedom too. Thanks a lot. So we have a couple of questions in the chat. So I would go for another one. Is that okay for you? Yeah, then I have to get off and talk to you. I've got to talk to the Federal Trade Commission about their new antitrust actions after this. Quite a morning. Okay, that's a good connection to the next question we had in the chat. So the question is, shall we talk more to politicians, decision-makers, or do we even have to create a political party? And if I may add here, I mean, we from FSFE are doing this lobbyism and advocating a lot. But do you see that we need this? Do we need more of this? And ask the questions that maybe a political, even a political party here. Well, I don't know about a political party. I mean, I think that this cross-cuts a lot of different kinds of political movements. And I think you do need to talk to politicians. And I think you need to talk to politicians about the specific technical dimensions of the monopoly problem in technology. But I think that the most powerful way to talk to politicians is in coalition with other anti-monopoly movements. Politicians also live this contradiction where they're being pulled in two directions. So politicians, at best and at worst, want to be able to exercise power. They want to be able to take their vision for how the world should work and make the world look like that vision. That's what a government is, right? And unchecked corporate power cuts against that. Or at least when the political interests of a politician are at odds with the interests of a corporate monopolist, then the corporate monopolist often wins. Now, politicians also rely on corporate monopolists sometimes because their agenda is aligned with the corporate monopolist, right? They just want to do it like for legitimate reasons, want to do a thing that the monopolist also wants, you know, whether that's companies that on the tech side who don't want the cable industry doing non-neutral internet stuff for their own parochial reasons because it undermines their profits. But the politicians' constituents also want the telecommunications companies not to be non-neutral and so they can form a coalition with the company. And sometimes it's a lot more cynical than that. Sometimes they just get a lot of money from the company to look the other way while the company does things that harm the user or the constituent. And so that tension is the fracture line that you need to exploit, right? Every politician who is getting money from a company to do its bidding is at least some of the time frustrated by the fact that they can't do what they think is best whether or not they're right or wrong. They can't do what they think is best because corporate power has gotten in the way. And there are so many people from so many different industries and so many different walks of life, people who wear glasses and people who love professional wrestling, those people are on your side on this question of unchecked corporate power. And so talk to politicians. Talk to them about political self-determination, right, about politicians being liberated from the undue concentrated influence of large firms and do it in coalition with other people who have other issues but care about the same thing.